Perry · 1934
Fred Perry wins Wimbledon
At a quarter to six on the evening of Friday the sixth of July 1934, on the Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon, Frederick John Perry, twenty-five years old, the Stockport-born former World Table Tennis Champion who had taken up lawn tennis only five years earlier at the relatively late age of twenty, defeated the Australian Jack Crawford in the Men's Singles Final 6–3, 6–0, 7–5 to become the first British male singles champion at the Wimbledon Championships since Arthur Gore in 1909, a twenty-five-year span that had become the longest such gap in the history of the tournament. Perry won the Wimbledon Singles title again in 1935 against Gottfried von Cramm (6–2, 6–4, 6–4) and a third time in 1936 against von Cramm again (6–1, 6–1, 6–0), the three-in-a-row Wimbledon-singles record that has been matched in the seventy-four years since only by Björn Borg (1976–80, five) and Roger Federer (2003–07, five), and exceeded by no British player. He took eight Major singles championships in total: three Wimbledon titles, three US Open titles, an Australian Open and a French Open, making him at his 1936 retirement the only player in the history of men's tennis to have won all four of the modern Grand Slams (the Career Grand Slam, eventually matched by Don Budge in 1938 and confirmed as the central single benchmark of men's tennis the next year). His Wimbledon win of 1934 ended the longest male-singles drought in the tournament's history and was the central single moment of British inter-war sport.
A drought is rarely broken in a single afternoon. The country's wait for a Wimbledon men's champion in 1934 had run for twenty-five years and had become the standing joke of the British sporting summer. The previous winner, Arthur Gore of the All England Club, had won the title in 1909 by beating a fellow club-member in a four-set final at the old Worple Road ground, before the move to Church Road, before the First World War, before the breakup of the British Empire's last apparent grip on the international amateur game. By 1934 the gap had become, in the Daily Express phrase the morning of the final, the test of whether English lawn tennis was a serious sport or a polite pastime.
THE STOCKPORT BOY
Frederick John Perry was born at 11 Carrington Road in the Adswood district of Stockport, Cheshire, on the eighteenth of May 1909, only child of Samuel Perry, a Stockport cotton spinner who had risen to be Labour MP for Kettering 1923 to 1924 and 1929 to 1931 and Co-operative-movement secretary, and Hannah Birch. He was raised in the working-class Adswood-and-Brinnington districts of Stockport through the early years and (on his father's parliamentary election) at Ealing in west London from his fifteenth year. He was schooled at Brentham Garden Suburb school and at Ealing County Grammar School. He took up table tennis seriously at fifteen in 1924 on the strength of his interest in the small Ealing community-hall games-room, took the Middlesex County Open Table Tennis Championship in 1927 at eighteen, and on the seventeenth of January 1929 in his nineteenth year took the World Table Tennis Singles Championship at the Drei Linden Hall in Budapest, defeating the Hungarian world champion Miklós Szabados in the final 21–18 in the fifth game. He held the World Table Tennis Singles title for one year.
THE PIVOT TO LAWN TENNIS
He decided in the late spring of 1929 to abandon table tennis at the height of his game and to take up lawn tennis, on the strength of his calculation that lawn tennis was the future of the international amateur-sport circuit and that table tennis (then an essentially amateur side-game with no significant prize structure and no international sport-political weight) had reached its commercial-and-sporting ceiling. He took the first lawn tennis lessons of his life at twenty at the Brentham Club at Ealing in May 1929 under the club professional A. R. Summers. He was, by his own subsequent autobiography, the oldest top-rank lawn-tennis player ever to take up the game from a standing start.
He worked at the conversion through 1929 to 1932 under the joint coaching of Summers and the All England Club coach Pop Summers (no relation). His natural-table-tennis quick-wrist forehand became the famous Perry running-forehand continental-grip stroke that has been an All England Club coaching benchmark ever since. He took up the international amateur circuit in 1930, was selected for the British Davis Cup team in 1931 at twenty-two, and through 1932 to 1933 worked his way through the world top ten on a sequence of Continental clay-court tournament results that brought him to the third-seeded position at Wimbledon by the spring of 1934.
THE FOURTH OF JULY
He came through to the 1934 Wimbledon Men's Singles Final in three weeks of unprecedented tactical-and-physical form. He defeated the American Sidney Wood in the quarter-final on the third of July (6–3, 6–4, 6–3), the Czech Roderich Menzel in the semi-final on the fourth of July (6–1, 7–5, 6–3), and met the Australian Jack Crawford in the Final on the late afternoon of the sixth of July. Crawford was the Australian-and-defending Wimbledon Champion of 1933 and was the bookmakers' favourite at four-to-one before the Final.
The match was held in front of a capacity Centre Court crowd of fifteen thousand on a hot afternoon. King George V was not in the Royal Box (he was at Buckingham Palace recovering from the bronchial illness that would carry him through the next two years to his death). The Duke of York (the future George VI) was in the Royal Box with his consort, the future Queen Mother. The umpire was the All England Club veteran Cyril Tolley. Perry served first. The match ran one hour and forty-five minutes through the early evening; Crawford was first-set unsettled by Perry's running-forehand pace and lost the first set 3-6 in twenty minutes; the second set ran on Crawford's break-points to a 0-6 close; the third set, with Crawford fighting back, ran to 7-5 at six-twenty-eight in the evening on Perry's third match-point service-ace. The All England Club Match Card recorded the final score 6–3, 6–0, 7–5.
THE GIFT AT THE NET
Perry's victory at Wimbledon was met by the All England Club committee, by his own account in his 1984 autobiography, with what he interpreted as middle-class condescension. He had been changing in the second-class dressing-room (the All England Club's normal practice for the new champions was to remain in the room they had been in through the tournament; Perry, as the working-class Stockport-and-Ealing boy of Cooperative-Labour stock, had been put in the second-class dressing-room for his run through the early rounds), heard the All England Club committee in the corridor remark that the best man did not win today, and resolved on the spot that he would never again play for the British amateur establishment without explicit recognition. The remark and the resolve became the standing fact of his subsequent career; he won the next two Wimbledons (1935 and 1936), the three US Opens (1933, 1934, 1936), the Australian (1934) and the French (1935), turned professional in late 1936 on the strength of a $50,000 American professional-circuit contract, and never played at Wimbledon again as an amateur.
He served as a Pilot Officer in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1945 (he had taken American citizenship in 1939), returned to England after the war as the international tennis coach to the All England Club and the British Lawn Tennis Association, and through the 1950s founded with the Austrian footballer Tibby Wegner the Fred Perry Sportswear company (the white-shirts-and-cardigans tennis-clothing label whose laurel-wreath logo became one of the iconic British casual-sportswear brands of the late twentieth century). He died at Melbourne in Australia on the second of February 1995 in his eighty-sixth year, in the city in which he had won his only Australian Open title sixty-one years before. The Fred Perry statue at the south-east entrance to the All England Club, commissioned by the All England Club committee in 1984 on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1934 Wimbledon win, marks the central single moment of British inter-war sport. The Perry name in modern English sport carries the weight of the evening of the sixth of July 1934.